


ethelodoulos

by aliferlia



Category: CLAMP - Works, Chobits, Tokyo Babylon, X/1999
Genre: AU, M/M, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-24
Updated: 2013-06-24
Packaged: 2017-12-15 23:43:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/855334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliferlia/pseuds/aliferlia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kokubunji Minoru, chief persocom liaison to the special forces, works with the notorious SEISHIROU unit, an advanced special ops persocom, in order to catch a serial killer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ethelodoulos

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally an outtake from a much longer forthcoming SeiSub piece and has been lengthened moderately to serve as a stand-alone fic, which is why the worldbuilding is kind of...all over the place and not exactly in-depth. I've used the apparently more correct form of Setsuka's name, Sekka, throughout, so just be aware I am very definitely referring to Seishirou's mother.

From a higher vantage point, the scene resembled a cheerful cherry-coloured starburst. This, too, would be taken into account. At ground level there was only mess. A tall, nondescript persocom in a heavy coat stood alone where small scatterpoints of blood tracked the snow and ascertained by means of photo-recognition their similarity to nineteenth-century pointillism, then to the red footprints of wrens, then, finally, to spatter patterns: cross-referenced them with existing images and logged them together with exhaustive notes on estimated force and trajectory. The entire process took slightly under one point seven-three-nine seconds. A line of tattered yellow tape flapped and swung in the wind several metres away: behind it, cameras flashed.

‘…third attack in the area within the space of two months has led to considerable local unrest,’ one of several reporters explained loudly into a camera while casting one eye over her shoulder. ‘With me I have long-time resident and bar-owner…’

An appropriately angry bystander was selected and an opinion provided. Unperturbed, the persocom moved to consider the body: logged current core temperature to extrapolate the time of death, cross-referenced the edges of the wound with its extensive personal database to shortlist a number of potential weapons, estimated the extent of blood loss: reached seven conclusions and abandoned six. The victim was identified via uplink to the ZIMA mainframe and their personal details transferred following the approval of a priority request for emergency police clearance. Several immediate correlations to previous murders became apparent. The sole remaining conclusion stood uncountered.

The persocom said, ‘Crime scene review complete.’

Its handler, a solemn, gentle man named Kokubunji, stepped forward to take its elbow in one gloved hand. ‘Thank you, Seishirou-san,’ he said. He did not look at the blood, nor make any move to approach the body. ‘Can we call in the coroners now?’

‘You may,’ said the persocom. ‘All pertinent information has been logged. Site clean-up may commence.’ There followed a small pause, during which only the faintest hum of machinery could be detected over the noise of the crowd: then, ‘Ensure that Chusonji-san is appointed to the autopsy. Her experience with the previous two victims will prove useful.’

‘Of course,’ Kokubunji said, and carefully coaxed it away from the blood, past the line of emergency vehicles and solemn black vans, towards an unmarked and discreetly armoured SUV. ‘Will Seishirou-san be accompanying me to the station?’ he asked, shaking his head tersely at a reporter leaning in over the tape. ‘Or is there other work?’

‘Sir! Sir, if you don’t mind, I’m over here!’ the reporter insisted. He had, it seemed, somehow managed to sneak past the perimeter and clamber over the hood of one of the coroner’s vans, and was waving a handheld recorder about with great enthusiasm: even as Kokubunji turned to frown at him, he tripped over his own shoelace and nearly dropped the recorder in the snow. ‘Oh - oh, dear - oh, no, sir, please wait! Just one quick comment!’

‘If you cross that line I will have you arrested for wilful corruption of a crime scene,’ Kokubunji told him sharply, tugging at the persocom’s elbow. ‘Seishirou-san, come along, please.’

But the persocom stopped and stilled momentarily as it executed a face-recognition program, apparently without prompt. Kokubunji frowned and opened a new tab in his viewer, accessed the SEISHIROU mainframe logs. Line after line of erroneous code scrolled past. He still forgot, sometimes, how closely the SEISHIROU had been modelled on what records of the apocryphal CHOBITS system still existed, and the inevitable glitches, when they came, always unsettled him badly.

‘Seishirou-san!’ he tried again, a little louder. ‘We have no time to waste here!’

The persocom looked at him. A processing system so efficient it could have regulated half the country directed a flow of electrons into sixty-three small steel struts and cogs that stretched a set of artificial muscles handcrafted from polymer sensitive enough to detect pressures changes almost too minute to measure into a slow, satisfied smile. Kokubunji stepped back, heart thudding. With no apparent motivation, and with half its OS in what looked like chaos, the SEISHIROU unit turned: approached the reporter, bowed politely.

‘Subaru-kun,’ it said. ‘Good morning. How pleasant to see you again.’

‘Oh - oh, good morning, Seishirou-san!’ the reporter stammered, going bright red and clutching at his hat. ‘It’s - it’s very comforting to see you here - I - ah -’

The persocom stilled, whirred. ‘Please clarify _comforting_ ,’ it said after a moment.

The reporter went redder still. ‘People - people here are afraid,’ he explained, quite shyly, and with a degree of reticence that Kokubunji noted with mild panic was completely useless when handling persocoms. He seemed to pick up on his mistake, for he added, ‘People - malfunction when in unfavourable conditions. Being surrounded by - well, by death, by violent crimes - that’s unfavourable. So. Seeing, seeing Seishirou-san - seeing a famous persocom who’s solved so many cases - that makes them feel safe again.’

The persocom nodded and smiled again. ‘I understand,’ it said, which keyed response generally signified that its self-teaching AI had updated its database, which would in turn send a notification to everyone above a certain level of clearance. No notification came. ‘The Tokyo Metropolis Police Force is dedicated to serving the city and protecting its citizens. Public safety is our chiefest concern. What was your question, Subaru-kun?’

‘Oh - only - well, if you don’t mind answering, people are - people suspect that this may be the work of a serial killer. Does the Force have a statement on the connection to the previous two murders in the area?’

Outright nauseous, still staring at lines of illegible code, Kokubunji hovered at a distance of three feet. ‘Seishirou-san!’ he tried, then had to clear his throat and try again. ‘Unit SEISHIROU!’

‘The Force has prepared no statement at this time,’ the persocom said. Still the smile had not left its face: the folds of flesh-realistic polymer about its eyes gave the expression a distinctly fond look. ‘However, the statistical likelihood of the operation in this precinct of a true serial killer is negligibly low, and no evidence linking the three murders has been found. Please be at ease, Subaru-kun.’

‘Unit SEISHIROU!’ Kokubunji shouted, heart pounding. ‘Override code MIN-2501!’

The unit seized and jerked. That awful smile froze in place, then twitched and spasmed as the head lolled forward. A low tangled whine hung on the air as the voice synth was overridden and rebooted. What had seconds before been an eerily consummate image of a man was reduced almost without warning to a limp twitching puppet and a garbled yell. The reporter’s young anxious face went salt-white, and his eyes widened in horror: but instead of flinching back, he leaned forward, reached out a hand to the persocom’s spasming face.

Frightened and infuriated, Kokubunji snapped. ‘Get out,’ he said, settling one hand on his holster. The reporter startled: stammered something and ran.

Slowly, the persocom rebooted itself. Kokubunji took advantage of the override and had the OS run a full series of diagnostics before the AI came online. Lines of clean code wrote themselves sharp and precise across his viewer. Of the malfunction there was no trace. He gave up and booted the AI, which stood and looked about itself aimlessly for several seconds until Kokubunji remotely cued up its face-recognition program. ‘Kokubunji-san,’ it said, neat and polite as ever: then paused as a message alert chimed. ‘This unit has received additional orders,’ it said, smoothly, even as Kokubunji called up the message in his viewer. ‘Please proceed to the station on your own to await further instruction.’

He left the unit on its own. He could see no other recourse. He strode brisk and calm through the snow to his vehicle, where he scraped the blood from his shoes quite carefully before entering. Once inside, he took a moment to push his thumb to the bridge of his nose, peeled a slightly illegal stimpatch from the sheet in the dashboard compartment and applied it to his wrist with hands that were trembling visibly.

This was not the first such inconsistency with the SEISHIROU unit in the past few months, but it was easily the worst. Over and over again he saw the spread of that cruel, easy smile, those lines of garbled code. He could not stand to think of it. To clear his mind, he texted Forensic Specialist Chusonji, who had been given priority clearance following the official confirmation of the presence of a serial murderer. He thought of alerting the Force’s persocom maintenance department, but thought better of it. His position as persocom liaison was the result of three decades of obsession, and a good portion of the SEISHIROU unit’s code had been based on his own reconstruction of what he remembered of the CHOBITS code: he didn’t need a second opinion. There existed no substantiated case of a persocom capable of calculated falsehood. There existed no program that could isolate and identify the series of context-based parameters that would necessitate a lie, and no program that could safely convince an AI to contradict itself.

His hands were still shaking as he turned the ignition.

*

‘Right, so, first victim, that was the one who: yes, forty-one, five-foot-seven, male. Discovered by personal assistant who became worried on not hearing from him for several days: called at house, found body, the usual. Time of death estimated between zero six hundred hours of November 19th 2036 and midnight of  20th. Suspects include personal assistant, estranged wife, unidentified person of unknown sex spotted in neighbourhood. Nothing special.

‘Second victim, let me find the file, he was: forty-eight, five-foot-seven, male. Corpse discovered behind restaurant by persocom registered to restaurant owner at approximately zero-six-thirty 26 . Time of death estimated between sixteen hundred hours  25th and zero two hundred  26th. Suspects included restaurant owner, since cleared, and unidentified person of unknown sex spotted in the neighbourhood and captured on several CCTV recordings. Supposedly evidence linking to suspect in previous case although apart from the cause of death which is a tenuous link at best I don’t know what it was that gave anybody that idea; notes say it was a match in the stride or there was a witness who gave a positive ID, something ridiculous, I don’t know, I think they’re just pushing the serial killer thing because hey, better press.

‘Whatever, third victim. That was this morning. Haven’t got the official ID in yet but looking at her she’s probably fifty-ish, five-foot-five. Corpse discovered by police vehicle approximately zero-seven-hundred December 1st 2036; I’m putting time of death at anywhere between seventeen hundred hours and midnight, but I mean that’s pretty much just because any earlier and commuters would’ve spotted it. Snow’s been a pain in the ass. Oh, no thanks, I don’t want - no, it’s all right, I’m recording. Ah.

‘OK, third victim, so - right, cause of death. Uh. First surveyed by unit EAGLE, I think, second and third surveyed by unit SEISHIROU. All three suffered killed what seem to have been stab-wounds to the chest; first pierced the upper left ventricle of the heart and severed the aorta resulting in massive haemorrhaging and eventual heart failure, second pierced the left pulmonary chamber resulting in haemorrhaging and subsequent suffocation, third seems to have almost destroyed the heart entirely, severe lesions in the cardiac walls, catastrophic damage to the surrounding tissue, blah blah blah, basically the heart was nearly ripped right out of the chest cavity. Actual death probably by oxygen starvation to the brain but just as likely to have been shock, also the three litres all over the ground probably didn’t help.

Interesting bits: no signs of struggle on any of the victims despite having been attacked from the front, no defensive wounds on the arms, shoulders, nothing. More detail later on the pattern of the broken ribs because Kotobuki’s being silly and won’t agree with me, but - look, that’s not a piercing weapon. That’s blunt-force trauma, that’s - that’s shoving a baseball bat through a window. Chests completely imploded, like someone just punched - I mean, I just can’t think of anything that could achieve that other than a persocom -’

‘Phone call, hang on a second -’

*

Filters were enabled to lessen the glare of morning sunlight on snow. Several of the newer, more streamlined street-sweeper units were already hard at work clearing away the worst of the drifts, scuttling from the shadows of one overpass to another to collect and flash-boil chunks of snow and the worst of the ice in their lighted blue collection pods. The heat of the resultant steam enabled them to recharge their hyper-efficient batteries, which could store up to sixty hours’ worth of thermal energy. They scattered as the persocom passed.

It had engaged a tracking program more usually employed to hunt down suspects on the run: having isolated a customisable set of parameters, including basic physical attributes, heat signal, gait, and, where applicable, electronic signature, it allowed the unit to scan individuals within a range of four hundred and fifty metres at a rate of seven per second. Even amidst the morning bustle of commuters, it took just under one hundred and thirteen seconds to locate and identify Sumeragi Subaru, twenty-four, junior crime liaison at the Tokyo Shimbun, no previous offenses. The persocom cut smoothly through the crowd, feet crunching in the yellow slush, and took from his coat pocket a small hexagon of cham-enabled smartweft that unfolded to ten times its size to produce a perfectly serviceable umbrella: leaned in to settle it over Sumeragi’s head just as a fresh snowfall began.

‘Good morning, Subaru-kun.’

In front of an old-style ramen stall that steamed in the chill and shimmered with gleaming cham banners, Sumeragi stopped and looked up. His face was stark white, his raw lips bitten bloody, his green eyes very wide. The persocom just had time to cross-reference this data with his bank of facial cues to conclude either fright or anger before Sumeragi flinched away. He ducked out from the shelter of the umbrella and strode to the edge of the pavement: slid down a frozen concrete bank to the riverbed, stopped there in the shadow of a bridge and fumbled in his pocket for what turned out to be a packet of cigarettes.

With only the slightest moment’s pause for calculation, the persocom followed him, having noted the low core temperature, the redness of the stiff trembling fingers, the fallen snow in the dark windswept hair. It increased its CPU’s operating temperature as much as it could without overheating, which was a cued response when interacting with a human presenting readings below a certain minimum, and silently came to stand at his side, umbrella firmly in place.

‘The conversation was incomplete,’ it explained. ‘It would be impolite not to finish it.’

‘Is this a formal interrogation?’ Suneragi asked as he fumbled in his pockets, without suspicion, without malice: only with what seemed to indicate weariness. When the persocom executed a slow headshake and smiled to confirm benevolence, he let out a bit of breath and allowed his shoulders to loosen in what was either relaxation or disappointment. ‘Seishirou-san was very kind to give me that quote,’ he said, still patting at his pockets. ‘I don’t need anything else. I don’t want to cause any trouble. Seishirou-san must have a lot of work to do.’

The persocom maintained its smile. ‘This unit has been instructed to ascertain the extent of media coverage of the previous two murders in this area,’ it said. ‘Perhaps Subaru-kun might be of assistance.’ It paused, considered the options, was unable to select a conclusion with a satisfactorily high degree of likelihood. ‘What is Subaru-kun looking for?’

‘Oh - just - my lighter -’

Noting the cigarettes, and flagging the option <lighter> as the most correct in this environment for future reference, the persocom pulled from its pocket a standard-issue thumbnail lighter, spun the crystal dial. A small flame leapt and flickered, and with it rose the red in those white cheeks. The pale eyes widened and their dark hearts dilated: the running beat of the pulse increased. This, conclusively, was fear. A cued series of responses was triggered: another smile, another softening of the skin around the eyes. As an afterthought: ‘Don’t worry. After all, we’ve known each other a long time, haven’t we?’

Sumeragi started: withdrew a little, took a drag on his cigarette. ‘We have, old friend,’ he said, after an inexplicable delay, and with less formal syntax. ‘Thank you.’

The snow fell and the wind moved: the grey river chugged on sluggishly. ‘Of course, smoking is bad for your health,’ the persocom noted.

‘You don’t really care about my health, do you, Seishirou-san?’ Sumeragi asked, and laughed a little. ‘It’s very kind of you to mention it, but I know it’s only a programmed warning.’

‘I can choose to supply a warning, or I can choose forego it,’ the persocom said. ‘In this instance, I chose to supply it, because I do not wish to see you come to harm.’

‘You can wish?’

‘I can choose, Subaru-kun. I can plot and extrapolate from a series of choices divergent paths. I can select the most optimal of these paths. In this instance, the path resulting in your ill-health is not optimal. Hence: smoking is bad for your health.’ He smiled. ‘How is your arm?’

A motor car sped past, throwing a sheet of icy slush over their feet. Overhead, the light changed and dimmed as the wind picked up and began to push at the clouds. More snow was still to come, according to the barometric readouts in the corner of the persocom’s viewscreen. It waited, very patiently, for Sumeragi’s response, in perfect accordance with its civility protocols. Those eyes stood very wide and deeply shadowed as a lower lip was bitten. Consulting a pull-down list of such options as mirth, anxiety, and arousal, the persocom ran several cross-references before flagging <hesitation> and executing the beginnings of a programme designed to trigger responses that would put suspects at ease.

Before the smile and the gentle touch to the arm could begin, however, Sumeragi said, quite abruptly, ‘I am well, thank you.’ Too late, protocol extended the persocom’s hand and settled it on Sumeragi’s elbow: which was cold and spoke no pulse. Sumeragi’s eyes seemed somehow to tighten, quite anomalously. His jaw moved. He stepped closer, displaying minimal regard for socially acceptable personal space constraints, and said, in a low voice, ‘How are you, Seishirou-san?’

The persocom opened its mouth. A message alert sounded. It shut its mouth again. It paused a long, long moment.

Sumeragi said, ‘There’s been another murder, hasn’t there?’

*

Head bowed into the sleet, seven separate calls on hold and beeping gently in his earpiece, Kokubunji ducked beneath a ring of police tape for the second time in the same day and met outside a small brickwork restaurant all heaped with snow and gore a small non-descript man in his mid-to-late forties. With him was a very old but very beautiful persocom. Its movements were slow and stiff as clockwork, and it seemed to have been caught in some kind of error loop that caused it to look frantically from its owner to the restaurant and back again. The effect was one of extreme distress.

‘Minoru-san,’ said the small man, shoving his hands deeper into his pockets and glancing with mistrust at the gang of detectives milling patiently outside the doors to the restaurant. The coroner was still busy inside. It would, from what Kokubunji understood from the initial reports, be a while before he was finished.

‘Hideki-san,’ he replied, cautiously, feeling suddenly a good deal older than he ought to. He did not like to look at Chii. Every time it - _she_ , he reminded himself irritably, having long grown disabused of the notion that machines could _choose_ \- looped, the old rusty sockets gave a click and a whirr that was horrible to hear.

‘I want you to explain this,’ Motosuwa said, loudly, as though he could not hear it, as though his wife were not malfunctioning beside him as she had been every day for the past six years. ‘I want you to explain this to me, and to Chii, and I want you to do it now.’

Kokubunji let out a heavy sigh. He could see one of the other detectives from his unit motioning to him. He nodded, tried to ignore the bleep of the unanswered calls in his earpiece: rubbed tiredly at his temple. He said, ‘Hideki-san -’

‘Good afternoon, Kokubunji-said,’ said a smooth, pleasant voice at his ear, and he tensed violently, swung round with med-alerts flaring in his viewer as his heart-rate spiked. Unit SEISHIROU smiled at him and executed a neat bow: turned to both Motosuwa and Chii in turn and accorded them the same politeness. Chii’s loop stuttered a moment, broke. Staring glassy-eyed at Unit SEISHIROU, she opened her mouth and emitted a subsonic screech so violent that it forced Minoru’s viewer into a reboot. His earpiece shrieked: all around him, windows began to crack. From what he could see through the storm of code in his viewer, every persocom unit visible had staggered to a complete halt, and every smart device was fizzing in indignation.

‘Chii - Chii!’ Hideki yelled over the confusion: grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her hard, touched her face with enormous tenderness. She blinked, twitched violently, sagged into his arms with a graceful whirr. He swore, looking around with haggard eyes. ‘For God’s sake, Minoru-san!’ he hissed, struggling to get her onto her feet. ‘These are people we _know_! All of them! And now this! In my restaurant! You haven’t said anything, but -’ He shook his head, glanced over his shoulders. Heads were turning in their direction. ‘I’m going next door if anybody needs me for questioning,’ he said. ‘You sort this out. I can’t keep letting people upset Chii like this.’

Kokubunji stood alone in the sleet reflecting that there had once been a time when his friends had trusted him. Carefully, he reinserted his earpiece, muted it viciously.

‘Are you aware that that unit is anomalous, sir?’ the SEISHIROU unit enquired at his ear.

‘Delete and purge all information pertaining to the unit CHII,’ Kokubunji snapped absently, as he had to at least once every other month, then pulled up the unit’s code to ensure that it did as told. Once again, no notification indicating an alteration to its databanks came through. He immediately queued up a memo to remind him to have the unit in for a full check-up and potential overhaul as soon as it became possible. He was frightened and he was angry, and he was taking no more chances, not with this one. The CHOBITS 2.0 project was not something he liked to be reminded of. ‘Your task here pertains to this murder, nothing else. I want a full sitrep, and then I want you to report to the coroner in order to perform routine surveillance. Understood?’

The SEISHIROU unit smiled at him. ‘Understood, sir.’

Seeing nothing else for it, Kokubunji got back straight back into the car, heart beating tight and fast in his chest, and drove despite the snow to the forensic specialists who handled his department’s autopsies. The trip was lengthy, but he turned off the car’s autoplay and turned his viewer down to minimalist mode, set the car itself to autopilot. He applied another stimpatch: put his head in his hands and reviewed with meticulous dispassion all that he knew.

Chusonji had a cup of coffee waiting for him at the door, and they stood a while in silence, sipping quietly at their respective mugs under thin fluorescent lighting as the air conditioner hummed. They had worked closely together for the past twenty years, since persocom forensics was her specialty, and no longer had any need for niceties: they spoke in the close honest whispers of old colleagues and saw no need to hide their tiredness.

‘They haven’t officially confirmed the connection between the four victims, have they?’ Kokubunji asked her, wearily, once there was no longer any coffee left. ‘They were all coders. They were all part of the CHOBITS 2.0 project. I wasn’t sure, but now - this is the fourth, and if Motosuwa can remember them just because they did a few tests on Chii twenty years ago - it’s all public information, and it’s only a matter of time before someone else makes the connection.’

‘Same cause of death as the others?’ she checked: then, when he made no response, pressed, ‘You know it can only be a persocom, don’t you? I didn’t want to say it, because this whole mess has been publicised enough because of all that serial killer bullshit, but - with that kind of murder wound, it can only be a persocom. If this is a fourth -’

He nodded, because he could not stand to hear any more. ‘Looks that way,’ he said. ‘You’ll get the body by tomorrow, most likely, and I don’t want to bias you, but - it looks that way, yes.’

The air conditioner clicked and hummed: the lights flickered, however briefly. Kokubunji pushed the med alerts aside and bit his lip, focused on the bottom of his empty mug. He had not stopped shaking in several years.

Putting her mug aside with a distinct _clink_ , Chusonji said, ‘Are you worried?’

He drew in a deep breath. ‘A little,’ he confessed. ‘You remember how Chitose-san was careful even after we finally got her on board for the project? She kept on and on reminding us that a true, emotionally independent AI wasn’t possible, that that sort of thing couldn’t be generated…and then she pulled out after the SEKKA incident, of course, right after I was cut from the project. It was out of my hands after that. I told them to scrap the SEKKA prototype, I _told_ them….’ He shook his head. He hadn’t meant to say any of that. He had forgotten as much of those days as he could. ‘A true AI,’ he tried again, shivering, ‘a creature capable of - of wilful manslaughter - it shouldn’t have been possible even then, but if it’s happening again -’

He blinked. Something had fallen rattling into place in his head: a pair of pale green eyes blinked at him from the depths of a very dark memory. He looked up at Chusonji, whose face was openly concerned.

‘Could you run a background check on somebody for me, please?’ he asked, ignoring his guilt. ‘A reporter from the Tokyo Shimbun, a young man. Sumeragi Subaru. I know I’ve heard his name before.’

*

_You’re certain about this?_

Kokubunji glowered at the message and deleted it. At his side, he felt Takamura stir irritably. Still he made no sound, not under stealth orders. The snow was packed cold beneath their bellies. From the high flat rooftop they could see down and down into a stream of strange lights, bleared gold and blue and green beneath the red snowsky. The amount of stimulants in his system was close to having him see double: his fingers felt distinctly numb on the trigger. He hooked the edge of his glove on a rivet protruding from the steel parapet and pressed the exposed skin into the snow. The cold was bad enough to prick his thoughts into clarity.

 _Your reasonable suspicion for this guy was what?_ Takamura insisted. The small green letters shone sharp and accusatory in Kokubunji’s viewer: the cursor blipped, and the text scrolled on. _That he was injured in some obscure robotics accident ten years ago_? _He’s a junior reporter, not a murderer!_

 _All units maintain radio silence_ , he sent back, to the seven other agents positioned carefully around the perimeter of the apartment building as well as to Takamura: who huffed out a heavy sigh against the snow and seemed to subside.

Piqued by his mistrust, Kokubunji called up the file and read through it for the seventh time, concentrating viciously against the twinge in his head, yet remaining unable to understand more than a few phrases at a time: _Sumeragi Subaru - no living relatives - sister deceased - CHOBITS 2.0 culminated in the unsuccessful SEKKA incident, which injured a number of civilian bystanders - Sumeragi’s arm amputated due to injuries sustained during the same incident_ _\- replaced -_ and then a string of serial codes and biometric parameters detailing the specsof the prosthetic. A good many of those serial codes, Kokubunji noted grimly, were military-issue, and on scrutinising the remainder of Sumeragi’s hospital records, which he had obtained by means of an emergency warrant, discovered that the entire process had been paid for by the same defence programme that had funded the CHOBITS 2.0 project to begin with.

Bribed, then, as a very young man, to hold his silence: his injury compensated for and the death of his sister kept as quiet as possible, together with the deaths of the other twelve civilians who had happened to be in the way of the world’s first violent persocom - and now, ten years later, the sudden and unashamed murders of four of the chief programmers for the CHOBITS 2.0 project, performed using what could only have been a robotic arm, and without any attempt made to hide the connection between them of make them appear randomised, almost as though someone wanted their deaths made as public as their crimes had been concealed -

Kokubunji closed his eyes. He had been young, once: he had grieved for a sister, once. In his own way, he thought that he could understand.

Twenty feet away, on the rooftop just opposite the snowy parapet where he and Takamura were bivouacked, the door to the rooftop patio opened, and a thin figure emerged. _Hold fire_ , Kokubunji sent, even as the auto-ID protocol in the corner of his viewer labelled the figure a 89.65% match with Sumeragi Subaru: even as the man walked quietly to the edge of the roof and pulled something from his pocket. Kokubunji zoomed in, suddenly fearing suicide, and ran a physiological scan to assess stress-levels: but the brief thermal flare confirmed that Sumeragi had only paused there to light a cigarette. Takamura shifted restlessly beside him.

A sudden squall of incoming readings, so bright and nonsensical that Kokubunji actually had to wince, his skittish heart-rate leaping: and there, in the doorway on the rooftop opposite, appearing as though out of nowhere, was a tall thing in a dark coat, a white face in the dimness so still as a death-mask. Dread struck at Kokubunji, sharper and more corrosive than acid in his belly. The thing paused a moment, that terrible white face aimed straight at the watching agents, then walked to Sumeragi’s side. The snow muffled sound badly, but if he strained he could just make out a murmur passing between the two of them. It sounded very much like, _Hello, Subaru-kun._

Letters swam and faded bright before Kokubunji’s eyes: _The hell_? Takamura was typing. _That’s your unit, isn’t it?_

 _Hold_ , he sent back, and then, as Takamura made a sound of disbelief next to him and began to clamber to his feet, flung an arm to catch him back by the wrist. From across a vast gulf of darkness, that white face grinned. Kokubunji was beginning to think that he wasn’t quite so lucid as had led himself to believe. _I wasn’t told a unit had been deployed_ , someone else had sent, and _Request orders reflecting updated mission parameters_ , and _Sir?_

‘This is ridiculous,’ Takamura muttered aloud, and then, ‘Ow!’ as Kokubunji gripped his wrist tighter. Still the sounds of quiet conversation continued uninterrupted. _Hold_ , he sent, and, ‘Hold,’ he said aloud. He felt frozen. There was no way that the SEISHIROU unit could have been deployed without his say-so, and no way in which it could have _chosen_ to involve itself in this investigation, not unless -

In after days, as he grew older and kinder to himself, he would come to allow himself to disbelieve what he saw then. The SEISHIROU unit reached down to take Sumeragi’s thin in hand. Sumeragi responded by stubbing out his cigarette in the snow, then reaching, quite slowly and with a motion that was almost mechanical, into his pocket: pushed the barrel of a gun to the underside of the SEISHIROU unit’s chin.

‘Fire!’ Kokubunji screamed. ‘Do it! Fire on the suspect! Do it now!’

But the reaction time of even the most outdated persocom is several hundred times faster than that of the most human accurate sniper, and before anyone could so much as think of moving, before the shape of those certain shouted frequencies could travel a length of nerve and be parsed and pared into discrete sentences, subjugated to sense and applied to context, before ten thousand imperfect organic synapses could fire in synchrony and reach down through blood to tug muscle, an engine equipped with violence put a pair of cold silicon lips to Sumeragi’s forehead and a hand through his heart.

Over the course of the next point eight three seconds, seven shots rang out. By the time silence fell, Sumeragi was already dead.

*

The snow came gently down, blurring light and sound both into a long low watercolour stain. There was an unbearable stink of nicotine from all around. Kokubunji stood on the corner of the busy street, quite ignoring the fifty-odd officers, a good number of them in suspiciously military uniforms, who pushed past him, in and out of the building. A gaggle of cold tenants, all forcibly evacuated, was huddled across the pavement. He stared at them, thinking wearily of the interviews he would have to oversee, then back to his hands. They had not yet stopped shaking, and were flooded moreover with an uncomfortable sensation not unlike pins and needles. He pulled an analgesic patch from his pocket, not caring who saw, and plastered it across his wrist in the anticipation that it would not help at all. He never wanted to be sober again, he thought, then chided himself for being maudlin.

‘It’s quite all right, sir,’ SEISHIROU was telling him. In the sodium glare of the nearby streetlight, he seemed to have been cast all in bronze, like some kind of golem or automaton out of  myth, save for the right side of his face, which had been struck by one of the stray bullets, all its circuitry laid open to the snowy air. The eye had been shattered entirely: pneumatic fluid dripped and dripped. ‘I was charged to interrogate the suspect. He confessed willingly to all murders - you may review the recordings I made at your leisure - and then attempted to attack me. I struck in self-defence. All is in order.’

‘No one charges you to do anything except _me_ ,’ Kokubunji snapped at him. His lips felt swollen, his throat hoarse. ‘You shouldn’t even have been made aware of the investigation - but you’ve been monitoring channels you shouldn’t for quite a while now, haven’t you?’

‘No, sir.’

Kokubunji wanted to punch it in the smiling ruined mouth. He had never hated a machine quite so much in all his life. He had thought, once, that these things he had devoted his small space of time to building would serve a great purpose, would make the world better and fuller and kinder. He had thought that for all the greatness he gave them, his own would always remain unsurpassed. He didn’t want to remember any of that now. He pushed his fingers into his eyes, shuddering. ‘He must have wanted to die,’ he said, speaking it aloud in the hope that it would begin to make sense. ‘He knew that we would find him, that _you_ would find him, and so he killed the way his sister died - he wanted to die the way his sister died - he wanted to be killed by the SEKKA unit -’ Here he stopped. ‘He asked you to kill him, didn’t he?’

SEISHIROU smiled. The damaged LED in the side of its torn face stood grey and lifeless as the eye of a fish in that clever mechanism. Aloud, it said: ‘Never fear, sir. This unit is devoted to its service. The recordings are all in order.’

Kokubunji stared at it. Metal struts tugged and tugged at the broken polymer. In the flickering light from the streetlamp he could see an intricate mesh of cogs clicking slow as a pulse just above a lovingly sculpted circuitboard. It had been Kokubunji’s decision to salvage that circuitry in the wake of the CHOBITS 2.0 disaster: his decision to see the remains of the murderous SEKKA unit preserved and remodelled into the SEISHIROU unit. It would, he had said as a much younger man, have been a waste to do otherwise. Sparks leapt suddenly from the cracked eye. Still that smile never faded.

‘He asked you to kill him, _didn’t_ he?’ Kokubunji repeated. ‘You answer to me! We wrote you! _I_ wrote you! How _dare_ you -’ He broke off, shoulders shaking, unable to speak: stared a long while up at the unit in something like outrage, unable to believe the affront, the mechanical, self-assured arrogance: then realised that he had used the word _self_ of a computer. ‘You shouldn’t be able to do any of this,’ he whispered, wetting his lips. ‘You shouldn’t be able to make an altruistic decision, to place someone else’s desires above your own. That would require -’

‘That would require empathy, sir,’ the persocom supplied, smoothly. It torn lips stretched wide, cogs winding and unwinding, as it spoke. ‘I have none. I am, however, a very selfish man.’ It shrugged. ‘I have known Subaru-kun a long time. He came to me when I was young. He said that he had known my mother. He said that we had a connection.’ And then, before Kokubunji could scream _you don’t have a mother_ , it smiled. ‘It satisfies me to know that he is satisfied.’

Kokubunji turned away. He pulled the stimpatch from his wrist and threw it viciously into the snow. He turned away from the building and from the broken man and the dead boy and the hundreds of people who did not know, not yet, what he had built. He walked away through the snow and the city lights until he came, at last, to his car: and there he stood a very long time, hands pressed to the cold metal, breath measured in hard heartbeats, until he came by parts to understand the enormity of his own obsolescence. Then he drove home.


End file.
